The effect of morphological complexity on short-term memory capacity

Németh, Dezső and Ivády, Rozália Eszter and Guida, Alessandro and Miháltz, Márton and Peckham, Donald and Krajcsi, Attila and Pléh, Csaba (2011) The effect of morphological complexity on short-term memory capacity. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 58 (1-2). pp. 85-107. ISSN 1216-8076

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Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between verbal short-term memory and the morphological complexity of words. Hungarian, as an agglutinative language, is of special interest for psycholinguistic inquiries in morphology. The authors presented two word-list recall experiments. The recall of the word list was measured by the classical span design. The item lists consisted of two-syllable stems (base words) and two-syllable morphologically complex words (stem+suffix). Within each list the words were of the same length, the same phonological structure (CVCVC), the same frequency and the same concreteness. The same experimental design was used with three-syllable words as well. Results indicated that morphological complexity had a significant negative effect on shortterm memory span, and that memory was better for derived words (e.g., boy+hood) than inflected words (e.g., boy+s), and regular than irregular words.

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